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In my experience: The UX, performance (objectively: not just in terms of CI speed, which is poor, but Largest Contentful Paint times for most user-facing pages

by lol768 4y ago

In my experience: The UX, performance (objectively: not just in terms of CI speed, which is poor, but Largest Contentful Paint times for most user-facing pages on gitlab.com as well as the average API response time figures for e.g. listing issues are also poor), stability and "community" (I'm thinking of third-party apps, integrations and marketplace for reusable CI components) is strictly worse than GitHub. Basic accessibility features for colour blind users lagged behind GitHub for years, making it difficult for me to even review diffs and work out what had been removed/added. In the end, I think the customisation feature only got shipped because an external company opened a merge request - and parts of it still fail WCAG AA today. There's no longer a gap when it comes to GitHub and GitLab in terms of CI support, and I really don't think some of the e.g. Kubernetes integration functionality justifies picking it as the canonical location for an organisation's code. Recently they've had to start to cut back on storage limits (and had to 180 on deleting repositories to try and free up space), which casts doubt in my mind on their financial stability. Really though, I'm just fed up of having to put up with using it day-to-day, because clients I work with decided it would be great to pick it X years ago when GitHub wasn't as feature-rich. I now look at companies who cheap out and run self-hosted GitLab/GitLab.com with some suspicion, and question why they're not using the de facto standard tool for the job. I look at it the same as if I found a Java shop that didn't use JetBrains' products for development, it's a red flag.

apple4ever 4y ago
I prefer it because even with the UI issues, its still better than GitHub.
smithcoin 4y ago
> I'm just fed up of having to put up with using it day-to-day, because clients I work with decided it would be great to pick it X years ago This is my sentiment today when using the product.
toastal 4y ago
My own anecdote: I took my most recent gig because of them self-hosting their Git forge and preferring open-source and indie tools to the ones put out by megacorporations. I'd see lock-in to GitHub as red flag instead of an “industry standard” requiring its employees to give away data to Microsoft, and making all of their code feed the Copilot machine.
- lol768 4y ago
  That's a reasonable position to hold, but if the goal is FLOSS I'm not sure quasi-proprietary GitLab (the minute you go beyond the basic features in the free version) is much better than GitHub. Some folks have concerns around Copilot but in most corporate settings, employees are going to be using private repositories which are specifically excluded from the training corpus. I think I'd have more respect for a company using SourceHut or Gitea if their priority was avoiding non-free services. I wouldn't personally filter a company on this basis (though I do have strong views on the operating system I'd have to use), but the demand for software engineers means it's quite possible and I respect folks for being principled.

by lol768 4y ago

apple4ever 4y ago

I prefer it because even with the UI issues, its still better than GitHub.

smithcoin 4y ago

> I'm just fed up of having to put up with using it day-to-day, because clients I work with decided it would be great to pick it X years ago This is my sentiment today when using the product.

toastal 4y ago

My own anecdote: I took my most recent gig because of them self-hosting their Git forge and preferring open-source and indie tools to the ones put out by megacorporations. I'd see lock-in to GitHub as red flag instead of an “industry standard” requiring its employees to give away data to Microsoft, and making all of their code feed the Copilot machine.

lol768 4y ago
That's a reasonable position to hold, but if the goal is FLOSS I'm not sure quasi-proprietary GitLab (the minute you go beyond the basic features in the free version) is much better than GitHub. Some folks have concerns around Copilot but in most corporate settings, employees are going to be using private repositories which are specifically excluded from the training corpus. I think I'd have more respect for a company using SourceHut or Gitea if their priority was avoiding non-free services. I wouldn't personally filter a company on this basis (though I do have strong views on the operating system I'd have to use), but the demand for software engineers means it's quite possible and I respect folks for being principled.